Segregation Is Back

Handed down sixty years ago Friday, the Brown v. Board of Education decision, like the Defense of Marriage Act ruling last June, marked a tipping point in America’s evolving morality: It was no longer desirable, tolerable or legal to have the legislative apparatus of the United States promote and enforce discrimination based on race.

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The court’s unequivocal language, that “separate is not equal,” set off wave after wave of civil rights efforts that affected nearly every walk of life. The activism and the legislation that followed over the next three decades would expand opportunities for people of color and forever alter the racial make-up of those who would participate in public life.

The focus of the law, though, was education. And in that arena, the legacy of that historic decision has been clouded by unintended consequences—the destruction of an entire class of African-American educators—and shifting demographics, including the dramatic influx of Hispanic immigrants to our communities. Its lofty intentions—to equalize access to educational opportunity for all—have proven to be no match for the unprecedented economic shift that has seen wealth and privilege become centralized in the hands of a relative few. As nearly everyone knows, in the last fifteen years, the country’s richest families have enjoyed an unparalleled rise in wealth while wages for middle and low-income families have stagnated. Educational advantage moves in lock step with family income. Sixty years after Brown V. Board of Education, the academic achievement gap between rich and poor students is now even wider than the gap between black and white students was in 1950.

From "The American Dream, Then and Now" by Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane

The most immediate and visible impact of the decision—the wholesale integration of public schools through rezoning and busing plans that rolled out over the thirty years that followed—was as controversial as it was sweeping. History books recall the shameful protests and legal challenges that many white segregationists mounted with increasing futility. Ultimately, black children and white children were sent to schools together. And as a social policy, desegregation paid almost immediate dividends for African-American students. The yawning achievement gap between white and black school children began to narrow. High school graduation rates for African-American school children began to rise. In the 1950s, 66 percent of African-American females graduated from high school. By the 1980s, when integration was well underway, that number was at 71 percent.

But because the decision specified that black children would benefit from an education with white children, the grossly underfunded African-American run public education system, which for decades had been dedicated to serving children in black communities, was dismissed as inferior and dismantled. In the 1960s and 1970s, many more black schools than white schools were closed. African-American teachers and principals, who in many states held about the same level of professional certification as their white counterparts and who for decades had served as steadfast anchors in black communities, were fired en masse. African-Americans would never again have as great a role in educating our county’s youth. Sixty years later, at a time when nearly half of all public school children in the United States are black, Hispanic or Asian, 80 percent of public school teachers are white.

As nearly everyone knows, the great desegregation experiment also touched off a “white flight” —the exodus of white middle class families from urban areas into the suburbs, where lending requirements and zoning laws seemed designed to keep the draw bridge up and low-income and even upwardly mobile African-American families out. In those years, communities became more racially and economically homogenous; and in the 1990s, district after district succeeded in having their court-mandated desegregation orders lifted. Segregation became the norm in public schools again. Currently, African-American children, and particularly low-income African American children, are just as likely to attend majority non-white schools as they were in 1960.

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A more positive lasting legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, though, was that it opened the door for the 1965 Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which forced communities to expend public education dollars using race blind formulas. Before the Brown decision, African-American children learned lessons in over-crowded, one-room school houses with outdoor plumbing and tattered textbooks while white children from the same communities attended well-appointed schools with low teacher-to-student ratios, generously-funded extra-curricular activities and brand-new textbooks. In 1954, Clarendon, South Carolina, the district at the heart of the case, the per-pupil spending for white students was four times what it was for black students.

These days, per pupil spending—which can range from $19,000 per pupil per year in New York State to $6,000 per pupil per year in Utah—is race-blind. In fact, with the increase in federal education spending, some schools that serve concentrations of minority students in urban areas get more, not less money than their white suburban counterparts.

But here, the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education turns out to be equality without equity. These days, in affluent, largely white communities, well-educated parents support public education dollars by providing basic supports that low-income families cannot routinely afford: ample nutrition, excellent health care and high-quality preschools. On top of that, wealthy families turbocharge the public dollars spent on their children. In the last forty years, they have more than doubled the resources they expend on equipment and activities for their children that enhance education—book, computers, tutors, summer camps and travel. In 1972, wealthy parents spent about $3500 a year on those so-called “enrichment activities” while low-income families spent about $800 a year. In 2006, wealthy families spent $8800 while low-income families spent $1300.

From "The American Dream, Then and Now" by Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane. Based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Per pupil spending is equal. But provided with the best opportunities money can buy, affluent children learn more and score better on SAT-type tests than their low-income counterparts. In low-income communities, too often, public education is the screen upon which diminished expectations are projected. In affluent communities, public schools are being used as a vehicle for one of the most dramatic intergenerational transfer of wealth the country has ever seen.

But nowhere is inequity—both by race and by income—baked more thoroughly into our public system than in higher education. At the time of the Brown decision, high school graduation was the culmination of most educational trajectories. No matter if students were white, black or Latino—few went to college. Since the mid-1990s, though, many more students of all ethnicities began to understand that to find a place in the new economy requires some sort of post-secondary education. Between 1995 and 2009, new freshman enrollment for Hispanics grew 107 percent, 73 percent for blacks and 15 percent for whites. Three quarters of all students who enroll in post-secondary education chose public institutions—four-year state colleges and universities, two year community colleges and less-than-two-year technical college and career centers.

But who enrolls where and what happens when they do removes any doubt that public education is not serving as the kind of social equalizer envisioned by Brown v. Board of Education. Academically able high school students of every race attend college at about the same rates (about 90 percent), but while high scoring whites are more likely to attend selective public and private colleges and universities, which tend to be better funded, high scoring black and Latino students are far more likely to attend community college or non-selective four-year public institutions, places where there is lower per pupil funding and where graduation rates can be stunningly low. The reasons why high-performing low-income students drop out of college are complex—lack of academic preparation, not enough financial support or poor guidance at home or at school. But one thing is clear, at the same time that black, Latino and economically disadvantaged students are flooding in to non-selective public institutions, fewer tax dollars are being spent to support their progress. According to the Center for American Progress, the investment of public dollars in public institutions reached a peak—$77.6 billion in 2008 and has fallen to $68.9 in 2012 (the last year these numbers were available). State funding, which once accounted for 31 percent of total revenue at public institutions, now accounts for 22.3 percent.

In matters of public education, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in his majority opinion, educational opportunity “is a right that must be made available to all on equal terms.” Inherent in the decision is the abiding belief that our nation should function as a meritocracy—that education should be the great equalizer. Educational attainment and the private satisfactions and material wealth that flows from it should be awarded to the smartest and the hardest working among us. Yet increasingly, we live in a country in which educational attainment and its rewards are determined not by personal merit but by zip code. We are not further from realizing Warren’s vision than we were in 1954, but we are not much closer to it either.

Peg Tyre is a journalist and author of The Trouble With Boys and The Good School. She serves as director of strategy at the Edwin Gould Foundation, which invests in organizations that get low income children to and through college. You can follow her @pegtyre.